Miniature guitar - working prototype

Another exciting day at Nerd Towers as we've finally completed our first working miniature guitar prototype. Not only does the instrument work as expected (touch sensitive guitar frets, and a touch-activated strummer) but the software is coming along quite nicely too.

Although the miniature instruments are HID/USB devices using a simple 8-byte buffer interface to talk back to the PC, some people may be a little uncomfortable working at such a low level. So we're creating an easy-to-use, event-driven COM object, so anyone can create their own custom software to work with the miniature instrument range.

No worrying about bitmasking, byte buffers or retrieving data - all that has been taken care of. Simply create an instance of the COM object, and write your code to respond to events such as

• x_instrumentConnected
• x_keyPressed
• x_keyReleased
• x_guitarFretChanged
• x_guitarStrummed

and so on.

Obviously, not all events are available to all instruments.

The key press/release events are specific to the synths, for example, whereas only the guitar and bass ever raise the guitarFretChanged event. Such an exciting post as this wouldn't be complete without a video demonstrating a working guitar - so here goes:

[youtube video goes here]